Here are some of the amazing things I have noticed about Cecelia’s food journey. At four, she understood that we were trying to change her food to make her feel better. In fact, she was on board with theidea. She didn’t like feeling bad all the time. The fourth day, I dropped her off at her grandparents’ for a few hours with a bag of food. I told them it was Mike’s idea to change her diet to lend the move some credibility, and thankfully, they didn’t say anything. When I picked her up Opa told me, “She was telling us how healthy food makes her happy.”

Cecelia was seriously addicted to carbs. Mike didn’t want to throw away the last three boxes of cereal he had, so he said after he finished them he wouldn’t buy any more. Even though Cece only ever wanted Cheerios in the past and thought Daddy Cereal was yucky, I caught her climbing precariously on a stool trying to get a bowl. She already had the milk (hidden in the back of the fridge) and Daddy Cereal out on the counter. We gave the cereal and milk to the pigs later that morning.

We don’t have many carbs in the house due to my previous attempts at grain-free living, but we always had a drawer full of breakfast bars. They were organic and every friend of my children’s knew where they were. They are usually the closest thing we have to a “snack” and I have spent thousands of dollars on them over the years since we had children. I think Cece ate about three a day. On day two of her diet switch we drove to Tupelo because the boys wanted to take their bikes to a skate park they heard about and I wanted to go to a health food store. We stopped at a gas station on the way to use the bathroom. Ben and Cecelia came in and I saw her eyes get wide at the rows of junk on the shelves. “Can I get a snack?” she asked. “I’m really hungry.” I started to panic as she walked up to the aisle and looked over candy bars and chips. Then she came to a bag full of Bunny white hotdog buns and grabbed it. “I want these!” I dragged her screaming for the buns out of the gas station and back to the car for a not-so-convincing substitute of an apple.

She was addicted to sugar found in carbs. We really never fed our kids candy, or twinkies, or junk food, so I thought Cece would be ok when it came to giving up sugar. Apparently, she was getting quite a bit in her bars, crackers, and bread, because when we cut it out she went crazy for fruit. On day one she at four apples down the core, a can of pineapples, and two applesauces. I had read that for the first few days letting them eat fruit as a substitute was ok. The second day she ate three apples. I cut out the pineapples and applesauce and added smoothies. She wanted to make smoothies three different times during the day even though she knew they had vegetables in them, which she formally never ate, just to get the honey and fruit we added.